The snow is back and it’s windy as heck too. My office is closing its doors at 1:00, but I was working from home today already. The local stations are doing their special weather programming. I like it best when they put the tiniest reporter on the windiest, most dangerous bridge in town for reporting the storm.

The Homescribe lives in Portland, Oregon, which despite its relative northerly location, actually has a fairly mild climate.  Well, not this week! Last weekend a rather bitter cold front with snow moved in and is staying. We’re expecting even more snow tomorrow and again this coming weekend.  It’s also very, very cold … only 19 when I woke up this morning. The wonder cats Hazel and Fanny were under the covers, helping me to stay warm.  

Homescribe’s manager graciously allowed her to work from home this week (thanks again, Michele!) and so it’s me in an ancient, but very warm pink sweatsuit, wool socks, and the wonder cats.

I sneaked out at lunch to stock up on food this afternoon.  Apparently, I was not the only one with this idea, as half of Portland weemed to be at my grocery store. I now have all the necessities, including wine and the makings for French toast, so I should be OK.

The City of Portland’s office of transportation offered up this advice for the storm tomorrow: “Don’t leave home tomorrow without a plan.” Actually, a good idea for any day, I think.

Dear Readers,

Just after my last post (prior to this one) my mother became quite ill and passed away in November 2007.  The homescribe was quite depressed for a while and didn’t have the heart to blog.

Homescribe is doing better now and returns to wish all a Happy Holidays for 2008.

One of the good, or maybe bad, things about working from home is having CNN on in the background. I’ve been listening to Michael Vick stories most of the day, but just now CNN is doing a snakes of a plane story, all about how dangerous critters are shipped as cargo on passenger planes.

 Of course, no story about airplanes could not get the terrorist spin. That dangerous critter flying as cargo could just as easily be a terrorist. Which I guess qualifies as a dangerous critter.

 Oh well, back to work. The homescribe is training from home on Live Meeting on Monday. Today is Friday. And the homescribe has to find time to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sometime over the weekend.

 Must go buy more coffee!

JASPER: Jobs Assets and Strengths Profiler

I discovered this on Monster.com today. JASPER is a test that you can take to learn about your work profile. The test takes about twenty minutes and, unlike most similar tests, I found it quite revealing.  There are a series of questions in various and interesting formats.

There are nine different JASPER types:

1. Thinker
2. Dynamo
3. Visionary
4. Motivator
5. Advocate
6. Organizer
7. Mentor
8. Achiever
9. Individualist

I am a 3, a visionary. Here’s the visual display of the report that JASPER returned for me:

Homescribe’s JASPER Results

You can take the test for free at Monster.

I created a new blog today, True Stories of Spellcheckers. It started when I heard about a hysterical substitution that Microsoft Word tried to make to an employee’s name. Next thing I knew, I had a new blog. Please come visit and share your spellcheck stories.

I just made my first lolcat. It’s based from a conversation that I was having with a good friend about the disappearance of bees, sometimes known as Colony Collapse Disorder, where bee hives are suddenly found empty and abandoned. It’s a serious problem that could have a major effect on agriculture if it continues. My friend made a joke that maybe they had been raptured. We’re always making rapture jokes with each other and are both fans of the bumper sticker that says “When the Rapture happens, can I have your car?”  So, it’s only fitting that my first lolcat has a rapture theme. I’ve submitted it to the wonderful lolcat site, I Can Has Cheezburger, another WordPress blog. But here is your pre-hopefully-publication preview:

 Yes, I know, time to get back to writing my mystery novel.

The new computer is wonderful. It’s not so much Vista (which I have no complaints about), but having 2 gbs of RAM is glorious, as is the new 20″ LCD widescreen monitor. I finished off the the look with a new wireless keyboard and mouse. All my equipment (0ther than my white iPod) is black and silver and I must say, it’s nice. I may be a geek, but I’m still a girl and a matching computer and accessories is nice.

The problem I anticipated from the very beginning turned out to be the one thing that caused some grief: transferring my music in iTunes to to the new computer. I first looked at the instructions from Apple, but they were 11 pages long and reading them over convinced me to not go there. I then evaluated Music Rescue, which looked good in the description, but turned out to not work.

I wound up with a terrific product called iPodCopy, which I highly recommend. It simply copies the contents of the iPod to the new computer, quickly and accurately.  The next time I synched up my iPod, it copied the contents of iTunes back onto the iPod. Quick, easy, and an intuitive interface. A big thumbs up!

I keep hearing people dissing Vista, but so far I’m pretty impressed. It’s working great for me: it’s fast, looks nice, and all of my software except for Scrabble is working fine on Vista.

I am a bit sad about Scrabble … I hope I can find a Vista version of my favorite game soon.

Being a visual person, I like having pretty wallpaper to look at on my computer. But I also get really tired of looking at the same pictures every day.

A couple of years ago, I discovered Webshots. You can put your own photos up for all to see. They also have a section of professional photographs that you can use for free as wallpaper or screensavers. Some of the professional photographs were “premium” and you had to pay to get those. But most were free and as a result, I had many beautiful photos to use as wallpaper.

With the new widescreen monitor, though, my regular-sized photos no longer work. Webshots does offer wide screen images, but it required upgrading to the premium offering, at $2.99 a month.

I have upgraded and have downloaded many beautiful photographs. Their tool runs in the background and lets you configure it any way you want. I’ve got mine set to give me a new background every four hours.

There’s a huge selection: nature, travel, pets, wild animals, flowers and gardens, space, and more.

If you like nice wallpaper, give Webshots a try.

Last week my old and dependable 19″ CRT started showing everything white as yellow. I can’t complain, as I only paid $50 for it in 2001, when my company was downsizing and the monitor had to be at least four years old at that time.

I read on the net that if you whack the CRT hard on the side, it might clear up for a bit, and indeed that did work for most of last week. But on Friday afternoon, it went yellow and stayed yellow, as if someone had put a yellow gel on the screen (or as if someone had peed all over the screen).

So, I dipped into savings a bit and splurged for a Viewsonic 20″ widescreen LCD monitor and installed it this weekend. I have to say that I really, really love it. The image is beautiful and the widescreen is wonderful. I can open all kinds of windows and see everything at once. This puppy runs at 1680×1050. Very nice.

I was so excited about the new LCD monitor that I took a long, hard look at my ageing PC: an old, but sturdy PIII that my brother had scavenged for me from his office, where he is an IT manager and had been told to get rid of all the PIIIs. My Dad and my niece also have nice PIIIs. It only has 256 mb of RAM, and can only go up to 512 MB.  As an impatient multi-tasker, I often ran into issues waiting for programs to open.

I took a gander at the Dell Outlet store and found a very nice machine with 2 GB of RAM, Intel Dual Core, a nice NVIDIA graphics card, and a hunky hard drive. It should arrive next week.  I got a great price on it and free shipping due to a special they were running. Couldn’t be happier. I have a screaming PC and a hot monitor for less than $1000, and I’m really, really happy in a geeky kind of way.